In response to the question, “What does it feel like to have a mental illness?” Ikpi offers an unexpected answer: “It feels physically uncomfortable.” Her essays bear witness in real time to the ways mental illness evolves over a lifetime. Essay writing gives her the breathing room to use language and form as a representation and embodiment of mental illness. Ikpi accomplishes this feat beautifully by transforming her struggle into art by experimenting with form. This emotional tumult is also known as Bipolar II disorder. The Nigerian-American writer, ex-poet and mental health advocate, who in her early twenties performed as a spoken word artist traveling with HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, takes readers on an ambitious journey: to express the highly personal, complex, and physical overload of cycling between extreme euphoria and unexplainable depression, sometimes within the course of one day. Nothing I have worked on or read over the years has accomplished in quite the same way what Bassey Ikpi does in her memoir essay collection, I’m Telling the Truth but I’m Lying: Essays. Over the course of my twenty years in nonfiction book publishing, I’ve acquired, edited, and ghostwritten numerous such books, all of which I hope have contributed to the robust dialogue and much-needed de-stigmatization of this topic. There is an entire library full of memoirs, one that grows greater every day, concerning issues surrounding mental health. I’m Telling the Truth but I’m Lying: Essays by Bassey Ikpi (Harper perennial 2019)
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